Did Mirri Maz Dur actually poison Khal Drogo?

[Lord of Raventree Hall]

I just reread that section of AGoT and noticed that what she does sounds like legit treatment, which Drogo promptly ignores. Like, I am no wound expert, but I do know the things Drogo does sound like things that could lead to infection. Also Drogo’s wounds are described by Dany and they do sound..semi-more severe than I remembered. 

Now to be clear I do think MMD killed Rhaego…but also she told Daenerys not to enter the tent….like…did MMD actually do anything that maliciously actually, or did she just follow first Drogo’s orders (it was not Daenerys who ordered MMD to treat him, which I think is confused because the show made it that way, but rather Drogo himself) and then Daenerys’s orders (which to be fair, I kind of understand Daenerys, her power basically came from Drogo previous to her dragon’s births. I can understand her desperation to not be in the Dosh Khaleen).  

Anyways, opinions? 

[Craving Peaches]

I was wondering this as well, I did get the feeling it was deliberately left ambiguous whether she really poisoned Drogo, or whether the wound got infected because he ignored her advice. Mirri would certainly have the means and motivation to poison Drogo, but his symptoms are indistinguishable from those of an infected wound and if it is poisoning, they do not 'conform' to any of the symptoms of named poisons in the series.

[kissdbyfire]

I don’t think so. But I do think she rolled the dice, believing there was a fairly good chance that Drogo, being the dumb alpha male type, would dismiss her and her treatment recommendations. 

[SeanF]

I think not.  But, she knew she’d get the blame for his death, and be put to death.  So she sought revenge on Drogo, Dany, and Rhaego.

[csuszka1948]

Here is an interesting post:

Mirri definitely purposefully bungled the medical treatment, and wanted Drogo dead. As she says when all is said and done.

"The stallion who mounts the world will burn no cities now. His khalasar shall trample no nations into dust."

"I spoke for you," she said, anguished. "I saved you."

"Saved me?" The Lhazareen woman spat. "Three riders had taken me, not as a man takes a woman but from behind, as a dog takes a bitch. The fourth was in me when you rode past. How then did you save me? I saw my god's house burn, where I had healed good men beyond counting. My home they burned as well, and in the street I saw piles of heads. I saw the head of a baker who made my bread. I saw the head of a boy I had saved from deadeye fever, only three moons past. I heard children crying as the riders drove them off with their whips. Tell me again what you saved."

Before her reveal though, Mirri is only introduced when she intervenes after Dany had successfully ordered the eunuchs to sew up and/or cauterize Drogo's wound, which Drogo was willing to put off (but still get done after his own men had been seen to). This is the treatment Cohollo receives and he ends up perfectly fine. Because it was the correct one. As Dany, Drogo, and Cohollo all knew.

Mirri intervenes here and instead offers her own services, convincing them off the basis that she's been trained by a maester which in theory would be superior to the eunuchs. Presumably she has to have been somewhat trained to know of Marwin, a confirmed maester that was in that area, but then she doesn't give a maester's treatment. Mirri proceeds to clean his wound with alcohol, but then she STUFFS the wounds with leaves and cooking spices, sews them SHUT INTO the wound (and badly as she says it will leave a horrible scar rather than an evenly stitched one like the eunuchs leave), and then covers it with a lamb skin for a "bandage" and orders that Drogo keep the SAME lambskin on for 10 straight days rather than changing it periodically. This will very obviously cause the wound to become infected. As it did.

The excuse about "not drinking", which Drogo obviously was going to do, as presumably so did every other Dothraki, is simply there to cover up what she did by sewing fucking dirt into a wound and then covering it with more dirt. She deliberately tried to make sure his wound got 10 days worth of harmful dirt and bacteria interaction.

We also know she didn't give him the maester's treatment as, apart from the obvious unsanitary nature of what she did, but Aemon and Qyburn, on Jon and Jaime's wounds respectively, both show us the exact same method that the maesters obviously use for wounds and preventing infection. Both of them clean the wound with boiled wine, cauterize/cut off the bad flesh, make a poultice of nettle, mustard seed and moldy bread, and then regularly change the bandages with new ones. We know the maester treatment for Drogo's wound that Marwyn would've taught her, and we know Mirri did not do that.

Mirri 100% purposefully infected Drogo. She wanted him dead for what he'd done. As she literally says in the first quote.

As to your own topic, your own quotes just further prove she knew exactly what she was doing. She was present for all of the times to prove that killing Drogo would have the most devastating consequences to those who'd harmed her and her village. If Drogo dies then Qotho at least for sure was going to start murdering among his khalasar, and we literally did see many of the Dothraki simply break off to start their own khalasars (which will mean fighting among themselves). Rather than show what she needs to do to keep Dany in power, it shows exactly what she needs to do to ruin them. Drogo is all that's keeping things together, and Drogo's who led these men to ruin her and her Lambs lives. So obviously she'll take out Drogo.

Hence why she interrupted his treatment from the eunuchs.

I don't blame Mirri at all for wanting revenge, but she absolutely did purposefully fuck over Dany.

[Maegor_the_Cool]

I hope she did. It’d be justice. Mirri Max Duur is a great hero of the Lhazareen people!

[Maegor_the_Cool]

I also don’t blame her for Rhaego. Dany knew the price. Though she refuses to acknowledge that. “Did I? No, if I look back I’m lost.” She outright refuses to think of it, because she knows it to be true. But Rhaego wasn’t a baby, just a clump of cells.

[SeanF]

4 minutes ago, Jon Snowfyre said:

I also don’t blame her for Rhaego. Dany knew the price. Though she refuses to acknowledge that. “Did I? No, if I look back I’m lost.” She outright refuses to think of it, because she knows it to be true. But Rhaego wasn’t a baby, just a clump of cells.

A mother would view that differently.

[Craving Peaches]

6 minutes ago, Jon Snowfyre said:

But Rhaego wasn’t a baby, just a clump of cells.

I'm not sure...

Rhaego was far enough along that the poison caused a sort of weird corrupted reptile foetus to be born, the fact there was enough there to be affected in such a manner suggests Rhaego had developed recognisable human characteristics - Daenerys also says she felt Rhaego kick so sounds like we are meant to see Rhaego as a baby who was murdered/died rather than Mirri being 'just' a criminal abortionist (even if she technically is such).

[Aldarion]

11 minutes ago, Jon Snowfyre said:

But Rhaego wasn’t a baby, just a clump of cells.

Biologically, baby is a separate organism from conception. And even ignoring that, as @Craving Peaches points out:

Quote

“Monstrous,” Mirri Maz Duur finished for him. The knight was a powerful man, yet Dany understood in that moment that the maegi was stronger, and crueler, and infinitely more dangerous. “Twisted. I drew him forth myself. He was scaled like a lizard, blind, with the stub of a tail and small leather wings like the wings of a bat. When I touched him, the flesh sloughed off the bone, and inside he was full of graveworms and the stink of corruption. He had been dead for years.”
Darkness, Dany thought. The terrible darkness sweeping up behind to devour her. If she looked back she was lost. “My son was alive and strong when Ser Jorah carried me into this tent,” she said. “I could feel him kicking, fighting to be born.”

So yeah.

[kissdbyfire]

2 hours ago, Craving Peaches said:

I'm not sure...

Rhaego was far enough along that the poison caused a sort of weird corrupted reptile foetus to be born, the fact there was enough there to be affected in such a manner suggests Rhaego had developed recognisable human characteristics - Daenerys also says she felt Rhaego kick so sounds like we are meant to see Rhaego as a baby who was murdered/died rather than Mirri being 'just' a criminal abortionist (even if she technically is such).

I agree, but also will add: what if Rhaego was conceived as a lizzy, and not transformed into one b/c magic?

[Craving Peaches]

39 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

I agree, but also will add: what if Rhaego was conceived as a lizzy,

Also a possibility, as we see from Fire and Blood. Either way though, I think he still died of unnatural causes or was killed... After all, he shows signs of life shortly before Daenerys enters the tent.

If I recall correctly the weird lizard babies from F&B were alive for a short period of time, whereas Rhaego died in the womb.

[Jon Fossoway]

I think Mirri's magic healing works as Moqorro's. Give something, take something back. If this is the case, we've yet to see what Vic is about to lose: he got the superhuman burned arm already.

[Lord of Raventree Hall]

19 hours ago, csuszka1948 said:

Here is an interesting post:

Mirri definitely purposefully bungled the medical treatment, and wanted Drogo dead. As she says when all is said and done.

"The stallion who mounts the world will burn no cities now. His khalasar shall trample no nations into dust."

"I spoke for you," she said, anguished. "I saved you."

"Saved me?" The Lhazareen woman spat. "Three riders had taken me, not as a man takes a woman but from behind, as a dog takes a bitch. The fourth was in me when you rode past. How then did you save me? I saw my god's house burn, where I had healed good men beyond counting. My home they burned as well, and in the street I saw piles of heads. I saw the head of a baker who made my bread. I saw the head of a boy I had saved from deadeye fever, only three moons past. I heard children crying as the riders drove them off with their whips. Tell me again what you saved."

Before her reveal though, Mirri is only introduced when she intervenes after Dany had successfully ordered the eunuchs to sew up and/or cauterize Drogo's wound, which Drogo was willing to put off (but still get done after his own men had been seen to). This is the treatment Cohollo receives and he ends up perfectly fine. Because it was the correct one. As Dany, Drogo, and Cohollo all knew.

Mirri intervenes here and instead offers her own services, convincing them off the basis that she's been trained by a maester which in theory would be superior to the eunuchs. Presumably she has to have been somewhat trained to know of Marwin, a confirmed maester that was in that area, but then she doesn't give a maester's treatment. Mirri proceeds to clean his wound with alcohol, but then she STUFFS the wounds with leaves and cooking spices, sews them SHUT INTO the wound (and badly as she says it will leave a horrible scar rather than an evenly stitched one like the eunuchs leave), and then covers it with a lamb skin for a "bandage" and orders that Drogo keep the SAME lambskin on for 10 straight days rather than changing it periodically. This will very obviously cause the wound to become infected. As it did.

The excuse about "not drinking", which Drogo obviously was going to do, as presumably so did every other Dothraki, is simply there to cover up what she did by sewing fucking dirt into a wound and then covering it with more dirt. She deliberately tried to make sure his wound got 10 days worth of harmful dirt and bacteria interaction.

We also know she didn't give him the maester's treatment as, apart from the obvious unsanitary nature of what she did, but Aemon and Qyburn, on Jon and Jaime's wounds respectively, both show us the exact same method that the maesters obviously use for wounds and preventing infection. Both of them clean the wound with boiled wine, cauterize/cut off the bad flesh, make a poultice of nettle, mustard seed and moldy bread, and then regularly change the bandages with new ones. We know the maester treatment for Drogo's wound that Marwyn would've taught her, and we know Mirri did not do that.

Mirri 100% purposefully infected Drogo. She wanted him dead for what he'd done. As she literally says in the first quote.

As to your own topic, your own quotes just further prove she knew exactly what she was doing. She was present for all of the times to prove that killing Drogo would have the most devastating consequences to those who'd harmed her and her village. If Drogo dies then Qotho at least for sure was going to start murdering among his khalasar, and we literally did see many of the Dothraki simply break off to start their own khalasars (which will mean fighting among themselves). Rather than show what she needs to do to keep Dany in power, it shows exactly what she needs to do to ruin them. Drogo is all that's keeping things together, and Drogo's who led these men to ruin her and her Lambs lives. So obviously she'll take out Drogo.

Hence why she interrupted his treatment from the eunuchs.

I don't blame Mirri at all for wanting revenge, but she absolutely did purposefully fuck over Dany.

I did a quick google search on ancient wound closing techniques and honestly….I am not so sure. However, I do agree it differs from the treatment we saw from Maesters..but there was a surprising variety in techniques the google search turned up and some of them even sounded kind of like Mirri Maz Dur’s technique. Listen, if the person you quoted has actually studied field medicine, I will totally believe him, but I feel like we are a bunch of non-experts trying to guess essentially, lol. For sure bandages can promote healing. 

Here a quote from an article entitled : “The History of Wound Care” (sounds an awful lot like what MMD did)

”What the ancients and early moderns referred to as plasters is the present-day equivalent of wound dressings. These plasters were mixtures of substances including mud or clay, plants, and herbs. Plasters were applied to wounds to provide protection and to absorb exudate. One of the most common ingredients used in plasters was oil. Oil may have provided some protection from infection as bacteria grow poorly in oil, and oil would have prevented the bandage from sticking to the wound as a nonadherent dressing”

Edit : More from that article 

“Egyptians painted wounds with green color. Green indicates life, and green paint contains copper, which is toxic to bacteria.”

Edited July 31, 2023 by Lord of Raventree Hall

[Lord of Raventree Hall]

12 hours ago, Jon Snowfyre said:

I also don’t blame her for Rhaego. Dany knew the price. Though she refuses to acknowledge that. “Did I? No, if I look back I’m lost.” She outright refuses to think of it, because she knows it to be true. But Rhaego wasn’t a baby, just a clump of cells.

Well, this is not really related, but I believe that each of Dany's 3 dragons lives were paid for by a different life : Drogo's life, MMD's life, and Rhaego's life; which means Rhaego has to be considered a baby and not a clump of cells (although I do agree with your sentiment as I am pro-choice, so don't get me wrong). My evidence for this is that at least one egg is mentioned to have movement inside BEFORE the burning scene; and I would suggest it is possible that 1 of the dragons was already alive as Rhaego's life had already been used to pay for it to be born. 

[sweetsunray]

I don't think MMD poisoned Drogo whatsoever. Initially, she aimed to be useful, while still in mental/emotional shock over what had happened to her and her people at the time. Her sense of purpose in life was healing and taking care of people.

Then they marched and by the time she's dragged into Drogo's tent by his bloodbrothers on Dany's orders, MMD comes off as extremely tired and depressed almost, and a crisis in faith. Why did her god allow all that shit to happen to her and her people, when they wronged nobody? When she sees Drogo's wound, she doesn't have a purpose in life anymore so she's all but ready to give up and be killed. Dany's pleading imo makes her see a way out of her mysery: she can help Dany by using magic to keep Drogo technically alive, and in exchange give up her own life. In other words, I think she wanted to commit suicide initially, and wash her hands of everything else.

But events unfolded differently: Dany gets carried into the tent while the blood magic ritual is occurring and Rhaego's life energy/soul as well as some of Jorah's is used. And when MMD saw Rhaego was half lizard, half human, she ended up believing that she was her god's instrument. That all that happened to her and her people was her god's mysterious ways to have her in the right place at the right time to perform a ritual in which Rhaego was supposed to die. Feeling purpose and used by a god as their tool is the heightest exactly when that person did not have that intent whatsoever and coincidences make it happen. MMD applied religious serendipity thinking here: "I wanted to kill myself, but some other force saved my life and drove events for Dany to give birth to her monstrous baby in a tent where death roamed. I was my god's tool."

Now that she believes she understands her purpose to her people and to her god, she becomes arrogant and cocky, and as she believes she was only doing what her god wanted her to do, she has no regrets whatsoever, but feels justified. And therefore acts like it, even as she is bound to the stake to be burned, and begins to sing.

 

[Springwatch]

On 7/30/2023 at 1:59 PM, csuszka1948 said:

Here is an interesting post:

Mirri definitely purposefully bungled the medical treatment, and wanted Drogo dead. As she says when all is said and done.

"The stallion who mounts the world will burn no cities now. His khalasar shall trample no nations into dust."

"I spoke for you," she said, anguished. "I saved you."

"Saved me?" The Lhazareen woman spat. "Three riders had taken me, not as a man takes a woman but from behind, as a dog takes a bitch. The fourth was in me when you rode past. How then did you save me? I saw my god's house burn, where I had healed good men beyond counting. My home they burned as well, and in the street I saw piles of heads. I saw the head of a baker who made my bread. I saw the head of a boy I had saved from deadeye fever, only three moons past. I heard children crying as the riders drove them off with their whips. Tell me again what you saved."

Before her reveal though, Mirri is only introduced when she intervenes after Dany had successfully ordered the eunuchs to sew up and/or cauterize Drogo's wound, which Drogo was willing to put off (but still get done after his own men had been seen to). This is the treatment Cohollo receives and he ends up perfectly fine. Because it was the correct one. As Dany, Drogo, and Cohollo all knew.

Mirri intervenes here and instead offers her own services, convincing them off the basis that she's been trained by a maester which in theory would be superior to the eunuchs. Presumably she has to have been somewhat trained to know of Marwin, a confirmed maester that was in that area, but then she doesn't give a maester's treatment. Mirri proceeds to clean his wound with alcohol, but then she STUFFS the wounds with leaves and cooking spices, sews them SHUT INTO the wound (and badly as she says it will leave a horrible scar rather than an evenly stitched one like the eunuchs leave), and then covers it with a lamb skin for a "bandage" and orders that Drogo keep the SAME lambskin on for 10 straight days rather than changing it periodically. This will very obviously cause the wound to become infected. As it did.

The excuse about "not drinking", which Drogo obviously was going to do, as presumably so did every other Dothraki, is simply there to cover up what she did by sewing fucking dirt into a wound and then covering it with more dirt. She deliberately tried to make sure his wound got 10 days worth of harmful dirt and bacteria interaction.

We also know she didn't give him the maester's treatment as, apart from the obvious unsanitary nature of what she did, but Aemon and Qyburn, on Jon and Jaime's wounds respectively, both show us the exact same method that the maesters obviously use for wounds and preventing infection. Both of them clean the wound with boiled wine, cauterize/cut off the bad flesh, make a poultice of nettle, mustard seed and moldy bread, and then regularly change the bandages with new ones. We know the maester treatment for Drogo's wound that Marwyn would've taught her, and we know Mirri did not do that.

Mirri 100% purposefully infected Drogo. She wanted him dead for what he'd done. As she literally says in the first quote.

As to your own topic, your own quotes just further prove she knew exactly what she was doing. She was present for all of the times to prove that killing Drogo would have the most devastating consequences to those who'd harmed her and her village. If Drogo dies then Qotho at least for sure was going to start murdering among his khalasar, and we literally did see many of the Dothraki simply break off to start their own khalasars (which will mean fighting among themselves). Rather than show what she needs to do to keep Dany in power, it shows exactly what she needs to do to ruin them. Drogo is all that's keeping things together, and Drogo's who led these men to ruin her and her Lambs lives. So obviously she'll take out Drogo.

Hence why she interrupted his treatment from the eunuchs.

I don't blame Mirri at all for wanting revenge, but she absolutely did purposefully fuck over Dany.

Interesting, but I don't agree with the post.

No-one was seeing to Drogo's wound when Dany arrived. She called for the healers, but was told Drogo wanted his wounded men to be seen first, which could take a long time.

Second, it was the eunuchs who came to him and were sent away, not the herb women who treated him after Mirri, and likely it was the eunuchs who treated Cohollo, because his wound could be sewn up.

It probably makes no difference, but Mirri didn't offer maester-style healing, only saying she had training from a lot of different sources. What she offered, in her temple, obviously came from her own healer-priestess tradition.

[Maegor_the_Cool]

6 hours ago, Lord of Raventree Hall said:

Well, this is not really related, but I believe that each of Dany's 3 dragons lives were paid for by a different life : Drogo's life, MMD's life, and Rhaego's life; which means Rhaego has to be considered a baby and not a clump of cells (although I do agree with your sentiment as I am pro-choice, so don't get me wrong). My evidence for this is that at least one egg is mentioned to have movement inside BEFORE the burning scene; and I would suggest it is possible that 1 of the dragons was already alive as Rhaego's life had already been used to pay for it to be born. 

Drogo and Rhaego were already dead by the time they burned tho

[Springwatch]

Years ago I heard some history of medicine telling of a war with so many casualties that the field hospitals were overwhelmed - wounds got basic treatment, were bandaged, plastered, and the patient sent home. The next lot of doctors were of course horrified to think what they'd find under those plasters after so many weeks without cleaning - but (in some cases?) the wounds were healing and clear of infection. Something to do with the type of bacteria irrc. Don't quote me.

I've been googling ignorantly around trying to find this story, and failed, but found some amazing things all the same. Wound packing is real - helps a deep wound heal from the inside out, which is important apparently. And I found a Smithsonian article mostly about the historical use of moss as bandage substitute, and it also says the doctors would 'stuff the wounds full of moss'. This is the link: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-humble-moss-helped-heal-wounds-thousands-WWI-180963081/

[James Arryn]

In my re-read it was also somewhat less clear than I’d absorbed over time. I just don’t think it can be made clear by pointing to the specific medical practices unless GRRM is expecting everyone to have similar/informed opinions about ~ magical medical practices of a fictional medieval-to-classical civilization. If it’s proven it’s in the confession. If we doubt that we should probably question the whole thing. But not sure to what end…Dany clearly believed it and wasn’t exactly in a great state of mind, so…yeah, it’s a potential uncertainty if you think MMD had motivation to lie to Dany about it, FWIW. 

Edited July 31, 2023 by James Arryn